


The View From Too Far Away

by kremlinology (orphan_account)



Category: Political RPF - Russian 21st c.
Genre: Angst, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, Ruspol, characters overthinking things as a literary genre, crude master and margarita references, its literally just misha sitting on his couch, khodorkov, musings, no really thats it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-11 00:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10451061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/kremlinology
Summary: «Коммунистическая партия...Дружба с олигархами...»“Join the communist party…Make friends with the oligarchs…”





	

Mikhail had never known what he wanted.

He’d been rich, so very rich. And yet dangling from the top of the Forbes-top-100 ladder he’d thought of his Komsomol days. He’d remembered the fervor that had gripped his brittle ten-year-old body, woven and wrapped with red sashes and armbands. And he’d felt the sort of regret he’d hoped the rich might be spared from.

He’d been political, and successful in it too. He’d done it as a salve for his wounds, though the blood on his hands was not his own. He'd joined the opposition. It had been good while it lasted. Yet he’d been betrayed, by a system he had thought himself a part of. A system that knew no deviation. A system that had never known good from bad, not once in all its lengthy, tortured, Beria-show-trial history. And he’d lost everything, so quickly: Yukos, freedom, Russia. One, two, three.

He’d been in love. He’d fallen in love and married and fallen in love again, and remarried. And yet he was still falling, the object of his love transient and transmuting. It escaped him further with every hour and every day he spent grasping at it. He was left empty-handed, or close to it: there were few constants in such a love, and fewer still that made sense. There was Inna. And Inna was lovely. But even her comfort was not always enough.

He picked up his phone to log in to Twitter, then thought better of it. Put the phone down on the coffee table. Put his head in his hands. And he sighed, a great, deep, low sigh, a Sisyphean sigh of labor and a Shakespearean sigh of blood. The fiery-hot fumes of disaster and frustration drifted from him slowly, like steam and exhaust.

He’d never known what he wanted. At least, not until now.

He coughed, drily and unexpectedly.

It wasn’t what he’d imagined. Not even close. He would never have thought of this. He hadn’t meant to get involved with Vladislav, certainly hadn’t meant to stay involved, but one thing led to another… to be a businessman in Russia and keep one’s head on one’s shoulders, you had to be involved with someone. It wasn’t going to be anyone else, and it had to be someone, he had thought, back then.

Yet even from the beginning he hadn’t meant for it to be Vladislav, hadn’t meant for things to turn out this way…

He rolled his head back on the sofa, the cool leather sticking to the damp skin on the back of his neck.

Vladislav. Surkov.

He whispered the name, knowing he was alone, knowing nobody could hear him, knowing the house was as secure as it would ever be, yet still vaguely ill at ease. He hesitated before repeating it, then stopped again, some dark part of him anticipating a sort of Beetlejuice-like effect: how Vladislav’s figure would emerge out of thin air, the beam of RT would light up the television set, a bottle of vodka would fall into his outstretched hand, his eyes would glitter so, and Mikhail would hear that soft, cultivated whisper, just like a memory: “Noblesse oblige.”

"Vladislav Surkov," he breathed a third time, working up his nerve. The name was not liberating so much as devastatingly, destructively addicting, like nicotine or violence. "Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov." A cruel man, some would say. Some who were now Mikhail’s allies. A ruthless man. A man with victims. A man whose word, more often than not, was law. But such was the world Mikhail had come from, the world he had learned to believe in, and it still felt like home.

Such was the man who had been his friend. He recalled their sunbaked evenings on the yacht off Athens, and the nights, one trickling into the next, spent thoughtlessly like hundred-ruble notes in the darkened, pulsating corners of European nightclubs – yes, such was the man he had known, and he still felt like home.

Mikhail crossed his legs on the coffee table and closed his eyes. There would be presidentials in a year and here he was, in London, so far from so much… Navalny was still out there, the arrest hadn’t stopped him for a second, but what were his chances? What were his chances when men like Vladislav twined their elegant, greedy fingers round the gearstick of power and forgot how to let go? Men like Vladislav, or even just Vladislav himself, a one-man band playing the Éminence Grise, dragged onto the stage and dragging the rest of the administration with him.

He grimaced, the pained expression twisting his delicate features. Yes, he knew what he wanted now, and – he should have known it would be so – it was the only thing he could not have. He’d thought he had it all, but he didn’t, and it burned him. He wanted a monster. He wanted Athens and Stockholm and Moscow, oh, Moscow more than anything. He wanted those long elegant fingers, cold from the joysticks and firing panels of power, and the lips that dispersed scented cigarette smoke and quotations from Ginsberg in the original English at two in the morning in the Pushkin Café. He dug his nails into his knees, and he opened his eyes. The room was close to spinning.

If the world was so bent on destroying itself, he thought, what could a heart do but follow? It was fate, of course. He wanted the only thing he could not have.


End file.
